It's the beginning of a new fiscal year, and a marketing director is allocating a $1 million budget across paid search, social media, and display advertising for the upcoming quarter. Their goal is to find the optimal spending mix that will maximize the total number of conversions. Which tool in Google Analytics is specifically designed to simulate different budget allocations and recommend an effective future strategy?

The right tool is the Scenario Planner. The director is doing forward-looking budget allocation: a fixed sum, several channels, and a question about what mix produces the best outcome next quarter. Scenario Planner models that, projecting outcomes for different allocations so the plan can be compared before the money is committed. The alternatives all look backwards. The Model Comparison report explains how credit for past conversions would be distributed under different attribution models, which is valuable context for planning but not a projection. The User Acquisition report describes which channels brought users in historically. Planning tools are only as good as their inputs, so cost data for non-Google channels must be imported first, otherwise a channel with revenue and no recorded spend distorts the comparison.